Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)

The one you already know, here for its place in the sequence. Published in 2006 after seven years of work, it circles Bechdel's father, Bruce, a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, returning to the same events from new angles instead of telling them in order. Joyce, Proust, Camus and Fitzgerald frame the chapters, and a gray-blue ink wash sets the mood. Coming back to it after the strip shows how far she pushed her precision: she posed for many of the figures herself and photographed the poses as reference. Time named it the best book of 2006, and it won the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.